Johanna Robinson

My personal collection of texts that influence my artistic practice.  www.johannarobinson.com

[johannarobinson]

Images have become for contemporary artists what tubes of paint were for the impressionists: Their sheer proliferation and affordability have destabilized singularity and smooth vision. Images have become materials in their own right. They are at the service of conflict between what was and what is.

David Kennedy Cutler, Apricota pg. 72

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For me, what falling in love means is different. It's a matter of suddenly, globally, knowing that another person represents your only access to some vitally transmissible truth or radiantly heightened mode of perception, and that if you lose the thread of intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desert-like state of ontological impoverishment.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love

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It does seem quite a strangeness-the floating downstream with a current that's so resolutely wordless. As though in all its modesty, its refusal to generate propositions, selves, ideas, this might be a cataclysmic change disguised as an unassuming indulgence. As though if I let my  habitual yes stretch this far there could never be another no.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, regarding arts and crafts from A Dialogue on Love

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I’m sure one could write a book of very disconnected fragments that didn’t so overtly weave into a whole—I’ve read many of them—but it’s also true that the mind will always work overtime to put disparate things together; the Surrealists mined that tendency for all it was worth. I think that’s a cool approach, to let the reader make the connections, but it’s important to me as a writer to make sure that the connections, when made, actually point toward what I want to be pointing at, rather than just reflecting the human brain’s capacity to make a bridge.

Maggie Nelson, http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/47

[johannarobinson]

The first slide that she had shown the children was of a drawing she said she had made when she was a teen-ager. It will be included in the Whitney show. Dark and smudgy and heavily worked, it depicts a silhouetted figure in a jail cell, reaching forward through the bars, which cast long shadows, toward a dog dangling a key from its mouth. The dog appears uncoöperative. She told me that the image may have come to her in a dream, which she has no wish to analyze.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-radical-paintings-of-laura-owens

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From the poem, “On Burroughs’ Work” – “A naked lunch is natural to us,/we eat reality sandwiches/But allegories are so much lettuce./Don’t hide the madness.”

Allen Ginsberg 

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It seems to me that the invention of the readymade was the invention of reality. It was the crucial discovery that what counts is reality, not any world-view whatever. Since then, painting has never represented reality; it has been reality (creating itself). And sooner or later the value of this reality will have to be denied, in order (as usual) to set up pictures of a better world.

Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, May 1990, pg. 218

[johannarobinson]

Any thoughts on my part about the 'construction' of a picture are false, and if the execution works, this is only because I partly destroy it, or because it works in spite of everything - by not detracting and by not looking the way I planned.  I often find this intolerable and even impossible to accept, because, as a thinking, planning human being, it humiliates me to find out that I am so powerless. It casts doubt on my competence and constructive ability. My only consolation is to tell myself that I did actually make the pictures - even though they are a law unto themselves, even though they treat me any way they like and somehow just take shape. Because it's still up to me to determine the point at which they are finished (picture making consists of a multitude of Yes/No decisions, with a Yes to end it all). If I look at it that way, the whole thing starts to seem quite natural again - or rather Nature-like, alive - and the same thing applies to the comparison on the social level.

The Daily Practice of Painting, Gerhard Richter, Sept. 12, 1990, pg. 218, 

[johannarobinson]

In the last year, Hahn has made waves with what could be described as art through the perspective of “the female gaze.” Her characters are allowed an honesty and peculiarity that figurative painting has historically underserved. In her 2016 show, Bent Idle, at New York City’s Jack Hanley Gallery, and in the works since, Hahn’s women are made not for consumption or performative perfection, but for living on their own realities. Women are not objects; they are vessels for experiencing the world–with all the conflict and emotion that comes with it.

https://blog.sixtyhotels.com/studio-heidi-hahn/

[johannarobinson]

The content of my paintings have a way of coming in and out of definition, leaving room for the viewers daydreaming. I dismantle any hierarchy between the terms I use, terms that are mostly surface, placeholders for secret codes, personal folklore or established painting tropes. The materiality of the paint is the only reality, and the vehicle to deliver emotional content. The ultimate story lies sometimes at the periphery of the picture, almost ready to fall off the canvas, out of grasp. A seemingly innocuous bowl of fruit in the manner of Manet not only becomes about that tradition but a disturbance. The bowl of fruit is a distraction from the darker reality of the picture. A painting safe word if you will. With this gesture an anxiety begins to form. The convention of classical depiction rubs up against more abstracted voids of the picture plane and the narration begins to unravel as soon as the schism is revealed. Painting becomes the ultimate form of manipulation, and the paint itself becomes complacent in the lie of representation. It’s in this way that pure artifice is allowed to become a sincere genuine moment.

Heidi Hahn, http://www.headlands.org/artist/heidi-hahn/

[johannarobinson]

But linear perspective also performs an ambivalent operation concerning the viewer. As the whole paradigm converges in one of the viewer’s eyes, the viewer becomes central to the worldview established by it. The viewer is mirrored in the vanishing point, and thus constructed by it. The vanishing point gives the observer a body and a position. But on the other hand, the spectator’s importance is also undermined by the assumption that vision follows scientific laws. While empowering the subject by placing it at the center of vision, linear perspective also undermines the viewer’s individuality by subjecting it to supposedly objective laws of representation.

Hito Steyerl, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/

[johannarobinson]

What is the definition of solipsistic? 1. of or characterized by solipsism, or the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist: Her treatment philosophy dealt with madness as a complete, self-contained, solipsistic world that sane people are not able to enter.

Google

[johannarobinson]

These days are days in which the horizon line holds less weight. The line thought to hold balance and grant orientation is a pictoral cultural construct. The sun marks the beginning and end of the day, but dictates the character of a day by the way it feels on the skin, whether the plants prosper, and the color of its light at different points in the season or on the globe. Gravity holds us fast to the earth and determines the paths of planets. On a picture plane, cardinal direction and the notion of gravity are only ways in which we depict our physical existence; they are ways in which we depict what we see in front of our own vertical bodies as they stand on the relatively horizontal ground beneath us. And yet, here, on the picture plane, we have a stage without rules. What does existence look like here? A gravity-bound reality is insufficient; instead these works instruct in spiritual symbol.

Amy Bernstein, A Case For Abstraction: No Boundaries

http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2015/07/a_case_for_abst.html

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When a recent review in the Guardian described the novel as “strenuously quirky”, it brought up a worn old criticism that July has always had to contend with: the suggestion that her work is woven from whimsy." “At this point it feels like a throwback,” she says. “I’ve been doing a lot of radio interviews all over the US, and there’s a certain kind of midwestern woman who, when she says, “You’re so quirky, I love it”, I really don’t judge her at all. I think, that is the word in your vocabulary and you mean that in the best way. And so when someone who has a wider vocabulary chooses to do that, I guess I think that they’re sort of limited. I would rather you say you don’t like it for very solid reasons, because to just call it quirky is to say I’m a little girl.” As tempting as it is to identify July with her female characters, those characters could never have produced the body of work that July has. The word “quirky” is belittling, creating the impression that her art falls from her like an accident and is not the product of dogged industry.

Catherine Conroy, http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/miranda-july-to-call-my-work-quirky-is-to-say-i-m-a-little-girl-1.2129301

[johannarobinson]

I feel it so keenly with July’s work, the unfairness of a label like this, because she writes about intimate female lives – huge terrors, profound experiences – which are often ignored because the voice she writes it in is … girly. Loneliness is not trivial. Death is not cute. To call stories like this quirky is to admit that you haven’t really listened. Occasionally a male artist is labelled quirky, but usually because his style is perceived as feminine. “Surreal”. In fact, male artists who are similar to July, whose work is unusual and prolific and who divides critics, are likely to be labelled geniuses. A genius, perhaps, is a male artist whose work is difficult to define. While with a female artist we have the word right here, ready. It’s “quirky." This is a problem with writing while female – there are a thousand ways to dismiss you. Your subject matter is petty. Your style is flowery. You don’t look like an author is meant to look. But “You’re quirky”, I think, is one of the worst, because it is said with a grin.

Eva Wiseman, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/08/killer-word-quirky-eva-wiseman

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“No. Something tells you that you haven’t painted when you must paint. Then, when you finally paint what you’re supposed to paint, then something tells you, ‘O.K., this is it!’ If you accept a painting that has good points, but isn’t really it, then you’re not on the track. You’re permanently derailed. It’s through discipline and tremendous disappointment and failure that you arrive at what it is you must paint.”

Agnes Martin, http://www.artnews.com/2015/07/31/what-we-make-is-what-we-feel-agnes-martin-on-her-meditative-practice-in-1976/

[johannarobinson]

I don't think anyone in my paintings is naked - they're not eroticized in that way. I don't think of them as bodies; they are so much more about images of images that I think of them in another way.

Mira Dancy, http://www.nightgallery.ca/assets/img/MiraDancy1477103911.pdf